Gold Shines

“Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.” – Mark Twain

People have chased gold since they realized that keeping a barter economy was not always feasible because commodity money like grain rotted, salt scattered, and cows were tough to take to the market. So, they invented money: stone money (Yap Island), salt (China and Roman Empire), ivory (Fiji), elephant hair (Africa), tobacco (Solomon Islands), brick tea money (Siberia), East Indian Money Tree (Malay Peninsula), Copper money (Alaskan Indian), to name a few.

The history of precious metals shows that as early as 2500 B.C. gold, silver, and copper were used in Egypt and Asia Minor to pay for goods and services. The kingdom of Lydia was minting coins in 700 B.C. made of electrum, a pale-yellow alloy of gold and silver.

People minted coins. Silver and gold coins had high value, portability, and payments by tale were made, counting out the right amount rather than weighing it. Even though animals did not die on the way to market, and perishable commodities did not spoil, there was always the possibility of being robbed of commodity money and coins.

Ridges were added to coins made of precious metals because humans filed the edges of coins to get gold or silver dust which they then sold as bullion or bartered for goods.

The next step was storing wealth in gold and silver bars. Bars held value over time and were easier to store as wealth. Most nations store their gold bars with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. From this location, nations can request payments to other countries and the respective gold amounts are moved from the safe shelves of the payor to the shelves of the payee.

The one troy ounce ingot today sells for around $5,200, while the 3 kg bar sells for around $167,000. The price of gold has increased dramatically in the last ten years by 700 percent.

If a currency was not made of gold and silver, its value was measured in gold and silver. This gold standard held for a while. After 1971 the gold standard became outdated as countries no longer backed the value of their currency with gold. Inflation exploded as countries printed money without any backing of gold or backing by goods and services. Fiat currency was born. Our U.S. fiat currency, the “greenbacks,” date back to 1862.

According to reports by the World Gold Council, the top 10 countries with the most gold reserves as of January 2025 are: U.S. (8,133.5 tons), Germany (3,355.1 tons), Italy (2,451.8 tons), France (2,436 tons), Russia (2,299.9 tons), China (2,068.8 tons), Switzerland (1,040 tons), Japan (846 tons), India (760.4 tons), and Netherlands (612.5 tons). U.S. gold reserves are kept in Fort Knox, Kentucky, but nobody has seen them in decades.

John Maynard Keynes, the famous Keynesian economist, wrote that gold is a “barbarous relic.”  Used somewhat in electronics and chemistry, gold has major uses in jewelry and as a store of value in ingots and collectible coins.

According to Ed Conway, the typical gold wedding band requires the removal “between 4 and 20 tons of rock” from the top of a mountain while traditional mining methods required “0.3 tons of ore” to make a wedding band.

Conway wrote that, in a single day, three-story tall trucks remove rocks from the top of a mountain, or the hole dug up into a mountain, the weight of the Empire State Building. “For a standard gold bar (400 troy ounces) they would have to dig out about 5,000 tons of earth.” It is thus no surprise that whole mountains have been torn down to produce gold. Nobody knows the exact amount of pure gold ever extracted.

And how do they produce gold? The rocks blasted out of the mountain are ground into a fine powder which is then mixed with a cyanide solution to separate the gold, quite a toxic method for the earth, humans, and animals.

It is not surprising that humans have tried for ages to turn other metals into gold. Enter medieval alchemists, scientists, and charlatans, trying to find the “philosopher’s stone or the great elixir” that would change lead or other common metals into gold and silver. The most famous alchemist, Nicolas Flamel, a Frenchman, claimed in 1382 that he was able to change lead into silver and mercury into gold.

Even though Nicolas Flamel claimed that he had found the “philosopher stone and the great elixir,” there is no evidence that gold and silver could be transmuted from other metals unless particle accelerators and nuclear reactors were used.

Although unsuccessful, medieval alchemists promoted unknowingly the advancement of chemistry, optics, mathematics, and astronomy. History is full of gold stories which point to human ingenuity and greed.

The medieval ruler of Mali, Mansa Musa (1312-1337), lived in spectacular splendor and largesse thanks to the gold mined in massive quantities by slaves.

Archimedes found the solution to a gold problem when he was hired by Hiero, the king of Syracuse, to detect if his crown was pure gold or was adulterated with silver. Archimedes found the solution while sitting in his bath and ran into the street shouting the infamous “Eureka,” I found it (the solution).

Gold is denser than silver and displaces more water in a tub when a gold crown is submerged than a crown made of both gold and silver. Silver is lighter so less water is displaced when such a crown is submerged.

Very few treasures in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia survived the European melting pot of the Conquistadores who looted temples like the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco.

Pizzaro and his men captured Atahualpa, the emperor of the Incas. Atahualpa offered to fill his prison apartments with gold in exchange for his freedom. He filled one room with gold and two rooms with silver. He kept his word, but Pizzaro not so much. Gold Inca treasures were melted for coins.

In 1492 Christopher Columbus and his men found gold jewelry on Arawak chiefs in the West Indies and, in the next 40 years, the fiercest gold rush ensued and “the majority of the known gold-producing regions of the New World were theirs.”

“The natives of pre-Columbian America prized the gold for its beauty, presuming that the shiny yellow metal had a divine origin. In Mexico, the Aztecs called it the excrement of the gods, while the Incas of Peru thought it to be the sweat of the sun.” Gold was not valued as a major metal for currency. Because it did not corrode, it was used for fishing hooks and other tools, or it was just admired for its beauty in decorative arts. All the gold confiscated by the Spaniards enabled them to fund their fearsome armada.

Not long ago, grave-robbers in Panama sold ancient gold objects to dentists to be melted down for use in dental fillings.

Never forget, “all that glitter is not gold.”

NOTE: Medieval alchemists were somewhat proven correct that lead can be turned into gold, if the CERN Large Hadron Collider from Switzerland is used. During high energy particle collisions, the lead nuclei pass near each other at near-light speeds and generate intense electro-magnetic fields. These fields can trigger photons to knock out protons from the lead atoms, turning them into gold.

Gold has 79 protons while lead has 82.

During Run 2 (2015-2018) 86 billion gold nuclei were created this way, amounting to just 29 picograms, too little to make a gold coin, but it was gold. So, the medieval alchemists' idea of transmuting lead into gold was valid as long as a particle accelerator was used.

"Building the Machine" Shines Light on Common Core

“Common Core will be raising good little socialists, who are in tune with their feelings, not so much their critical thinking skills.” – Author unknown

“Common sense of the common people is more important for the health of the nation than the ideas of the philosophical elites.” – Wayne Brasler

The best documentary on the National Common Core Standards, Building the Machine, was directed by Ian A. Reid, who set out to illuminate the sixty-two percent of Americans who had not heard of Common Core in 2013. www.CommonCoreMovie.com

Common Core, the brainchild and work of 30 individuals under the aegis of the Governors’ Association and with the help of almost $200 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is the tool to achieve the “fundamental transformation” of our society by adopting nationalized education “standards” that require students to find another way to reach an answer, particularly in math and science, even if the answer is wrong, justifying the incorrect answer as the path to helping students learn to think critically. The fact that the student needs to reach the right developmental age to think analytically and critically does not seem important in this newest educational scheme.

I gave examples of ill-conceived lesson plans, textbooks, and inappropriate reading materials in many subjects in my article here. http://canadafreepress.com/article/teach-common-sense-not-common-core

The national teaching standards were adopted by 45 states without parental or teacher input, under confidentiality agreements, without public debate, untested, untried, unproven, and certainly not “internationally benchmarked” or “state led” as it is now promoted in ads.

The bait for adoption was the $4.35 billion worth of grants offered through the President’s stimulus package. States had two months to write proposals in order to be eligible for the Race to the Top grants. Hurting for money because the economy was so depressed, 45 states applied and, in doing so, they accepted the Race to the Top Standards.

The standards, which were to become Common Core standards were not debated, “the drafts were cloaked,” there were no hearings, no testimony, just “some truncated public comments and no response to comments.”

“The Common Core standards were designed for an industrial model school,” claiming that they are “rigorous, even though they can’t tell you what makes for rigorous or non-rigorous standards.” Marc Tucker believes that they are designed for “work force development in the German model system.” Andrew Hacker, Professor Emeritus at Queens College, called Common Core standards, “a radical change from the past.”

According to the documentary, Building the Machine, “players” involved in developing, funding, adopting, and advertising national Common Core standards were:

-          Achieve, Inc.

-          Fordham Institute

-          The National Governors Association

-          Council of Chief State School Officers

-          U.S. Department of Education

-          Foundation for Excellence in Education

-          U.S. Chamber of Commerce

-          45 governors

-          Jeb Bush

-          Mike Huckabee

-          School Officers

-          Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (donated $200 million in 2012 alone to adopt Common Core) http://canadafreepress.com/article/building-the-machine-the-common-core-documentary

The Validation Committee was composed of 30 people who had to sign a confidentiality agreement that they would not discuss what took place in the meetings. (Dr. Sandra Stotsky)

Five committee members, a significant percentage, did not sign the final standards and were thus “expunged from the record.” Dr. Jim Milgram said, “They are not giving the public any idea of what’s going on.” Dr. Milgram and Dr. Stotsky were the only mathematician and English language arts content specialists on the 30-person validation committee. Neither approved the standards.

Replacing basic arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication) with Constructivism, teaching children how to “construct” their own way of figuring out an answer, even if it’s the wrong answer, and replacing English literature selections with New Criticism Literary Analysis, using leftwing norms of morality and behavior, appears to be a recipe for mediocrity.

We are a diverse nation populated by individuals with different talents, ability, IQ, motivation, interests, and dissimilar childhood experiences. Some children live on farms and some in the cities, some are affluent and some are not.

College should help Americans become life-long learners, not ideological robots. Education should be about our children, not the “system.” Paul Horton, Veteran History Teacher, University of Chicago Lab Schools, thinks that the “Current policy makers see the purpose of education as training people to acquire the minimum level of skills that are required to work in a technical workplace.”

In this Race to the Top competition standards that baited many into adoption of leftist ideas of what education should be, what race exactly are we supposed to win and against whom?  

We are not trying to win any race; we are trying to pursue happiness, our American way of life, and keep our constitutional republic intact and safe, maintain our Christian heritage and faith, and reject the overt indoctrination into Islam. We do not need billionaire elitists, politicians, or Hollywood to tell us how to think, how to live, or dictate our faith.

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has released a new video, Common Corruption – Elitist Indoctrination, in which one of the Pearson Publishing former executives, Kim Koerber, explains the profit motive and the role of textbook publishers in our children’s education and what is the aim of Common Core. http://www.projectveritas.com/

“I hate kids. It’s never about the kids. Don’t kid yourselves…. It’s all about money.”

“Common core is really important because it needs to be some cohesion between the states and Texas keeps screwing it up over and over. Texas got upset about it and they wanted to have their founders, they wanted to pound the fathers in it. … The dead white guys did not create this country. It was a whole bunch of different kinds of people. And yes there were women, and yes, there were people of color and yes, you need to talk about them too. But they want to talk about those dead white guys.”

According to Kim, conservative voters don’t agree with birth control and therefore do not want their kids to learn about it. Conservatives object to the very graphic lessons on sexuality and sexual perversion, and STDs that small children would be subjected to.

According to Kim, conservatives object to the approximate math of Common Core because they do not understand the new math, they did not study it in high school.

Kim is of the deceptive opinion that conservatives want the Constitution taught but only the parts they like. It seems to me that she wants only the parts progressives promote when she says, “Damn the Second Amendment! I don’t think personal handguns need to be on anyone except the government, the police.  What is the purpose of having a gun?”

Kim should study the history of the Holocaust and communism when only the government and the police had guns – more than 100 million innocents lost their lives at the hands of their governments.

Donald Trump spoke at the National Tea Party convention against Common Core and the “bureaucrats in Washington [who] are making a lot of money, they don’t give a damn about your kids in South Carolina…. Nobody can win when you are in favor of Common Core, it’s a disaster.”

Ted Cruz said that, as president, on his first day in office, he would instruct the Department of Education to end Common Core.

Santorum echoed the opinions of the other presidential hopefuls. “The real issue for common core is the elites in our culture who want to indoctrinate our young people into a certain way to think, a certain belief structure, and it’s all spread out through Common Core. I believe the best and safest way to maintain our values in this country is to leave it up to the people at the grass roots level.”

According to Kim Koerber, “conservatives don’t like being told what to do by people they don’t agree with.” She wants history to include lessons about the Wild West and its prostitutes.

When “Republicans want to influence what is being taught,” Koerber said, “Common Core does not put up with that.” Apparently progressives know better and we must comply with their standards. Conservatives must be told how to think. “I can’t stand it, said Kim. If they talk to me one more time about common core, about climate change not being real, I’m just gonna scream.”

The elites who push Common Core do not think much about Christianity.  Kim Koerber continued, “I am really glad that here in California, whatever religious affiliation you want to take is fine, but in Texas they want to push the Christianity.” …”That’s why is so offensive to have these prayers in the school board.”

“Christianity is totally out of the Common Core. Yes, it is.  Totally!  It’s not a core concept at all. But then there is a mention of other religions like Islam.”

Apparently Kim Koerber does not understand that we were founded on Christianity, not Islam. Islam had made no contribution to the establishment of our country and of our success. Europeans fled the tyranny of monarchs so they could live and worship in peace.

It is very profitable for textbook companies anytime someone changes something in a textbook, said Kim. “School districts then have to adopt new books. It is all about the money.”

Koerber admits that there is a liberal bias in the Common Core standards. “So, I think the progressive bias is that the more educated you are, the better you are.” Education may be good but there are certain things that kids don’t need to know in such stark and pornographic detail and at such a tender age.

The reporter argued that kids were doing math and science just fine before Common Core; Koerber replied that critics don’t like it because the government is telling them what to do.

She continued, “The separation of church and state they don’t understand. They don’t like that. They don’t like equal rights between all groups. The voter suppression in the south is unbelievably awful.” What voter suppression? What planet BIG LIE does this woman live on?

Smearing critics that, “People who are not educated are easy to flim-flam, and that they react by fear instead of by knowledge,” Koerber is proving the progressive elitist arrogance that they are the only smart ones and they hold the academic key to knowledge. Fortunately, informed and intelligent people see through progressive stratagems and through Conformity Core indoctrination into collectivism and Islam.

Of course, now that the omnibus bill has been signed last month, the next education federalization that is augmenting Common Core comes as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), S.1177, sponsored by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) which was included in the omnibus bill.  https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/1177

Deceptively named “Community Schools,” promoted by Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), these government schools will replace parental responsibilities under the guise of “early childhood learning, medical and dental screenings, and career counseling,” all of which have been done unsuccessfully under Head Start, Medicaid, and school title programs.

Jane Robbins, attorney and activist with Truth in American Education, is quoted in the New American, such “schools will be expanded to replace family and church as the center of every child’s life, offering myriad ‘services’ including mental-health programs.” She added that “Few things should alarm parents more than the prospect of the government’s assessing their child’s mental health and proceeding to fix any problem the government claims to find.” http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/21395-obamas-community-schools-aim-to-replace-parents

Arne Duncan, former Secretary of Education, had boasted that these government schools will care for some American children 24/7, while all students will become global citizens and will be converted into ‘green citizens’ with UNESCO as ‘global partner’ and its World Core Curriculum. http://www.unesco.org/education/tisf/mods/theme_c/popups/mod18t01s03.html

Now we really understand why curricula around the world are relatively the same --manufactured history, neglected traditions, white achievement bashing, multiculturalism, no unified language, the fundamental transformation into one world collectivist government with its sustainable development everything.